Page 49 - Decoding Culture

42 DECODING CULTURE
of culture was much more complex and significant than prevailing
traditions of thought had hitherto grasped, and in Culture and
Society 7 80-1950 and The Long Revolution he set out to examine
1
and rethink those traditions.
This led him into a lengthy consideration of the concept of cul­
ture, first in terms of its historical development (especially within
the 'culture and civilization' tradition) and then, more abstractly,
with a view to developing appropriate concepts and methods for its
understanding. It is the latter that particularly concerns me here,
and its major locus is to be found in the first part of The Long
Revolution. Hall (1980a: 19) rightly describes this book as a 'text of
the break' and as 'a seminal event in English post-war intellectual
life'. It is here that Williams (1965: 57-58) spells out most clearly
his well-known three definitions of culture: the 'ideal', where cul­
ture is concerned with perfection in terms of absolute values; the
'documentary', where culture is a body of work capturing human
thought and experience; and the 'social', where culture refers to a
distinctive way of life. To examine culture is, for Williams, to exam­
ine all these aspects.
Cultural history must be more than the sum of the particular his­
tories, fo r it is with the relations between them, the particular f o rms
of the whole organization, that it is especially concerned. I would
then define the theory of culture as the study of relationships
between elements in a w h ole way of life. The analysis of culture is
the attempt to discover the nature of the organization which is the
complex of these relationships. (ibid: 63)
'Pattern', he suggests, is an essential focus for this cultural analysis,
both characteristic patterns of culture themselves and the rela­
tionships that link such patterns. Invoking Fromm's concept of
'social character' and Benedict's 'patterns of culture', he searches
for terms to describe what for him is the central distinguishing
feature of the phenomenon: 'a particular sense of life, a particular

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